


Lobelias and Lilies

by Eristastic



Series: Under(fairy)tales [4]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Abuse, Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Character Study, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-28
Updated: 2016-02-28
Packaged: 2018-05-23 19:15:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6127309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eristastic/pseuds/Eristastic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You're a child gifted by the gods - a blessed child - but if this is what it means to be blessed, you're not sure that you want it.</p><p> </p><p>[Thumbelina AU for no good reason I can think of]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lobelias and Lilies

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for mild self-harm/suicide idealisation/both psychological and physical abuse.  
> They're all to varying degrees and only the psychological harm is what I would consider to be graphic, but just to be safe.
> 
>  'Cover page' can be found [here](http://eristastic.tumblr.com/post/144264689052/second-set-of-cover-pages-for-my-fics-roses-and).
> 
> Lobelia - malevolence, lily - purity

You’re supposed to be a blessing.

A child given to a couple who couldn’t have any: a child gifted by the gods, they said, but as time went by, more and more distaste slipped into their words. A child gifted by the gods, and they wouldn’t even give you a name.

You’re too small to be useful. You curse your size. You curse the time it takes you to run from one end of the table to the other; the strength needed to climb up furniture, strength your thin arms don’t have; the horrid waiting and hoping that someone will come through the door and let you in or out because you couldn’t in your wildest dreams reach the handle.

The size of a thumb or thereabouts, and completely useless for it. You don’t blame them for hating you.

(Except you do, sometimes, late at night when you hear them discussing what they could possibly do with a child they always have to keep an eye on, lest they step on you)

But no, that’s wrong, that’s wrong, you’re not supposed to think like that. You’re a good child. You try and help: you try and learn to sew because everything else is lost on you. You’re no good at it and your ‘mother’ shouts at you when you ruin another piece of cloth.

You almost welcome the frog when it kidnaps you. He’s so gentle: he takes your hand and hops in front of you, pulling you to his home. The house behind you – the village, with all of its prying eyes – fades into the distance and you run with him.

His house is so much smaller and you can finally help: you can finally do the housework and earn your keep. You like it. You begin to smile. He smiles with you, laughs in his rough, croaky way while he drinks barley tea and blackberry wine in the evenings. Some weeks pass there, in his small house by the river. It gets damp, but you tie up your clothes around your thighs and you don’t mind much. He praises you.

After maybe a month, he starts talking about his son.

“You’re going to be the best bride for him!” he croaks happily, patting you on the back, and you smile hollowly. You’re not a bride. You’re not a groom. You’re neither, you’ll never be either, but your protests stick in your throat like fishbones. He praises you. He calls you a ‘good girl’. You can’t say anything.

On a day when the clouds hang low in the sky, red and pink ribbons fraying above the river, his son comes home. The frog’s cooked a feast of grasshoppers and roots for you three; he’s carefully, lovingly tied your hair up with tiny white flowers. He’s so happy.

His son is pleased with you, and you smile.

They speak about your future together, and you smile.

His son starts talking about what a good wife you’ll be to him, and you run. Tension spikes and surges in your veins and you sprint to lock yourself up in the bedroom. They pound on the door but your blood is like fire, boiling your muscles into action and you take the sewing scissors in the corner (almost as big as you, but your arms are stronger now) and you shear the hair from your head. You cut and cut until it’s lying in ragged russet piles on the earthy floor: until it’s cut so close to your head that you can feel the cold.

“Come out now! You’re so ungrateful: this is _your_ future we’re planning for! You’re being such a bad girl!” the frog cries through the door.

“I’m not a girl!” you scream back. You say nothing about being bad.

He shouts, his son shouts, they both rage at you and you curl up in the corner, picking at your skin until there are red-turning-brown stains all over your clothes.

You’re a child gifted by the gods, but you’re by no means blessed.

They throw you out and the frog is angrier than you’ve ever seen him before. His eyes boggle out of their sockets. He spits at your feet. His voice is too full of croaking to understand. You run as far as you can down the river bank, mud caked on your feet to block the stones; you scramble up rocks and only fall into the water a few times.

A mouse finds you. She tuts at you as you lie, exhausted, on a rock in the rising sunlight, but she smiles at you too. When you smile back, it’s empty and strained but she doesn’t seem to notice. Giving you her hand, she takes you back to her house.

She works you very hard but you don’t mind much. She wakes you and guides you and feeds you and tells you when to go to sleep, and you collapse into your pile of straw and heather every night feeling like you’ve accomplished something. It’s alright, you think. You can feel your skin crawling any time someone comes to visit the mouse, but she doesn’t mind if you stay out of the way. You know, logically, that no one will be looking for you-

(Why would anyone look for _you_?)

-but you feel the fear anyway, like it’s a leech feeding on your skin, crawling over your legs and ripping into you. What if your ‘parents’ come? What if the frogs come?

But, for weeks and weeks, you see nobody but the mouse. She’s quiet and frowns a lot, but she’s fair.

Your hair grows back, slowly, and the mouse cuts it for you. It rests around your neck now and you prefer it there: you prefer the fringe to hide under and the emptiness where its weight hung over your back. The mouse brings you scraps of cloth to make new clothes with and you do, working by moonlight when you can. Roots and berries and seeds are so much more pleasant than bugs, too.

You feel like you can breathe here.

After some time, though, the mouse’s tuts and frowns become darker. You’re growing up and you need more cloth, more food, and she only has so much. You work until your hands bleed, until you can barely stand up on your shaking legs, but it’s not enough to make her smile.

“You’ll have to marry the mole,” she says one night. “He has a comfortable life: he’ll be able to take care of you.”

Your throat goes dry, but you smile like a doll would. A painted smile, hiding everything behind it. You wish she could see. You wish she could understand.

She thinks she’s doing you a favour when she brings you to his house. A trial period, they say, to make sure you get along.

The mole leers at you and the mouse leaves you without looking back. You wonder if it was easy for her, to abandon you here. You wonder if she ever liked you at all.

(You don’t see why she should have)

The mole works you harder than she ever did because the mole doesn’t work. He sits around and thinks, occasionally speaking into the silence with lofty thoughts he seems to believe are clever. You work around him, terrified every time you catch his tiny, dead eyes on you. Even so, you smile all the time, until your cheeks ache more than your arms do.

He likes you.

He makes you want to die just to escape him.

He doesn’t touch you much, but he knows it: he smiles and says he likes the feel of your skin, so different to his. He likes your hair, your clothes, your size. You please him and you loathe him. He never lets you go outside. He asks things of you as if you should be honoured to do them for him. He calls you pretty, beautiful, a ‘darling girl’, and he seems proud.

The trial period withers to its final days.

One night, he becomes intoxicated on hopes for the future. He tells you how lovely you’ll look when he marries you. You’ll be decorated in lobelias, he decides.

You forget to smile and he hits you.

The same thing happens the next night, and the next, but you can’t make yourself smile anymore. It hurts so much: not just his weak blows and his sharp, sharp teeth, but your mouth feels stretched far enough to rip even when you’re not smiling anymore.

There is hatred rising through you, past the terror and panic, and on the fourth night you hit him back. You stop immediately, horrified at what you’ve done (you never react, you never speak back, you _never_ raise a hand to them in return!) but there’s hatred in him too.

You wonder if the mouse knew about it when she left you with him.

At some point you manage to get away and you take the candles, throwing them against the furniture, burning everything you can reach. You run and you run, his shrieks of damnation echoing in your ears for hours.

You are not a child gifted by the gods. You are not blessed.

You are worse than nothing.

Nobody looks at you when you walk down the river bank. Worse: they not-look at you, avoiding you, shielding their children from you. There have been rumours, clearly, and nobody smiles at you.

There are those who throw pebbles at you. There are those who hurl abuse at you with fiery tongues. There are those who laugh, those who threaten, and none offer to listen to you.

You keep smiling. You’ve become better at that.

There’s just enough for you to eat, so you keep walking for a long, long time. The river never seems to end. It just flows past you, through fields, by distant villages, through forests that take weeks for you to walk through. It bubbles against rocks or runs smoothly when the bed is deeper.

When frost creeps up on you, you know where to go.

No one will help you so you find a wide, flat piece of bark, and you lie on it. You let yourself be taken away, far faster than you could ever go by yourself.

You hope it drowns you in your sleep. You hope the cold takes your breath and freezes it in your lungs. But those are just pipe dreams. You know you don’t deserve such a peaceful death.

Sometimes, you can still hear the frogs’ cries, calling you a disappointment and ungrateful.

(‘For what?’ you want to ask, but you think you know)

Sometimes, you can still see the mouse turning away from you like you were just a burden on her all along.

(‘But I worked so hard for you!’ you want to say, but you know it doesn’t matter)

Sometimes, you can still hear the mole’s screams as he curses your existence.

(And now, you have nothing left to say in your defence)

You wake up grounded on the banks of the river. The air doesn’t seem as cold here, and some way from the river’s course you can see a bed of lilies. You’re so tired. You drag yourself to one and climb into it. You let yourself fall asleep for the last time.

 

When you wake up, it’s to look into the face of a boy you’ve never seen before. He’s nothing like anything you’ve ever seen before. You’ve seen so many different creatures but he’s like none of them: all smiles and glowing white fur and the brightest eyes you’ve ever seen. He picks you up carefully and you let him.

 

For a long, long time, you live with him. There’s still the size difference between you, still the panic you feel ripping through your organs when you see other people, but he makes it not matter so much anymore. In time, you don’t feel constantly on edge around him as well. In time, you can speak to his parents. You get used to it. You begin to smile: small smiles that don’t reach the apples of your cheeks.

His fur is perfect for holding onto. There’s no way you could keep up with him, but you can sit on his shoulder, by his neck, and then you can go places together. Then you can do things together. He takes you all over his kingdom: the flower beds sparkling with dew, the criss-crossing rivers that fall from rocky mountains, the plains that spread out, dotted with villages.

No humans in sight.

No animals who might have heard the rumours about you.

There’s just him.

He gives you a name, in time. He asks you yours and you tell the truth: nobody ever thought to give you one. There was only ‘you’.

He frowns and you worry, picking at the skin of your wrists. You’ve messed up. You’ve displeased him, you’ve made everything wrong, you’ve-

“Would you like one?” he asks, smiling.

Hesitantly, you nod.

“Do you have one in mind?”

“No.”

“Really? Nothing at all? Then…could I pick?” He looks so excited, so you nod.

“Thank you!” he beams. “Let’s see…well, I found you in a Calla lily, so maybe we could call you Chara?”

There’s no difference between the words in his accent, and you nod, smiling. It doesn’t hurt. You don’t tell him that where you come from, Calla lilies are called pig lilies, false lilies. He looks so happy that you couldn’t possibly tell him.

It’s stupid, but you know you can’t disappoint him.

Slowly – so slowly it’s as if he’s scared of shocking you – he tells you about his kingdom. The history, the people, the stories, and the reason you see no humans here. His kingdom is dying. He doesn’t seem to understand that that’s what he’s saying, but you can understand his parents’ softened truths that he relays to you, even if he can’t.

They say only a human soul can save it.

You don’t really understand the specifics, but you lie awake at night, picking at your skin, peeling it in your concentration. You want to punch the walls, to scream and tear your hair out and break things and _cry_.

You wanted to believe this was Home.

But you’re not a child gifted by the gods. You’re not blessed. You’re a worthless, tainted human child and if you have anything at all, it’s what he’s given you.

He’s given you kindness.

He’s given you patience.

He’s given you love. He’s told you over and over again. You can see it in his excitement, in the jealousy he doesn’t even seem to recognise in himself.

He’s given you everything.

And it all makes perfect sense to you. You’re useless. Disgusting. Pointless. You can’t even imagine a world where you might deserve what he’s given you, so you’ll pay it back. It’s a simple enough transaction, whether he knows that’s what he’s asked of you or not. Either way, it’s okay: even if he doesn’t understand, you understand for him.

You smile so hard. You laugh until it hurts your throat.

By morning, you’re ready. You know he won’t help you with this, so you go to the old, cracked stone altar by yourself. You walk for hours and hours, not stopping until you reach it and its meadow of buttercups.

You wonder if this is your blessing: if this is what it means to be you.


End file.
